


Impractical Exercises for Not-So-Young Magicians

by mayhap



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/pseuds/mayhap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The future is in the cards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impractical Exercises for Not-So-Young Magicians

**Author's Note:**

  * For [treewishes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/treewishes/gifts).



Eliot was the one who found her, was the one who had the idea of drafting her to come to Fillory in the first place. He had the advantage of the other surviving Physical Kids in that he had met Quentin immediately upon his arrival at Brakebills, while Quentin's life in Brooklyn was still relatively real and present to him. Eliot had done the lion's share of the talking during those lazy summer days, of course, tossing off infodumps like they were Oscar Wilde one-liners, but in his more tentative rejoinders Quentin had salted in details about his James-and-Julia existence, which Eliot had committed to memory for possible later use as effortlessly as he did his classwork. Actually locating her was not particularly difficult; magic users had too many different ways of finding each other and not enough ways of staying hidden, and Julia was performing naive magic, hedge magic, uncomplicated by the endless subtleties of circumstance and countermeasure that were the product of a Brakebills education.

She was both like and unlike Quentin's description of her when Eliot spotted the shingle she had hung out and put down his ten dollars for a tarot reading. Her thick, wavy hair was glossy and dark, with only a suggestion of heaviness near the straight white part to suggest that she achieved this look with infrequent bathing instead of with product and blowdryers. Her face was skim-milk blue, her freckles standing out unhappily against the pallor like something unwholesome caught in the surface tension. Her eyes burned like the cherries of two cigars, but she would not look directly at him as she shuffled and reshuffled the cards, and when she spoke the conventional words of a tarot-reading she gave them the line-readings of an elementary school play.

"What is the question you want answered?" she asked, giving the pack a final shuffle with stiff fingers and extending it in his direction for him to cut. Eliot ignored the cards and leaned forward over the table.

"My question is a fairly simple one, as it happens," he temporized easily, going directly for the sales pitch. "How would you like to be queen in Fillory?"

Now she did look at him, although her great, brilliant eyes still seemed somehow dull. "You're one of Quentin's friends, aren't you."

Eliot shifted minutely under her gaze, acutely aware that his tightly-concealed wings were ruining the line of his bespoke Hong Kong suit and that if he didn't return to Fillory soon they were going to precipitate a full-blown fashion disaster. Into the awkward, all-consuming space between them, Julia slapped down the top card from the deck.

"The Magician," Eliot read from the bottom of the card, unnecessarily. "It's a good thing you're not actually required to dress like that or I never would have lasted a day," he added, squinting at the shapeless tunic and the unfortunate headband in the Colman Smith art.

"Are you doing this?" Julia demanded, flatly.

"No, but you might be," Eliot said. He sensed tendrils of uncontrolled magic escaping out into the world, acrid like cheap cigarettes and polyester. "You know that you're a magician, right?"

"That's not what _they_ said." She snapped down another card. The King of Swords. "I sat the exam, you know. I answered every question they threw at me, chief exports of imaginary cities, circumference of a square circle, you name it. I put down my pencil and the next thing I knew I was back in that fucking toilet stall at the BPL and James broke it off with me, for good this time, and Quentin never even came back, not really."

Three more cards in succession, all minor arcana–the Three of Pentacles, reversed, the Five of Cups, the Nine of Swords, a sad and bitter tale. The folding card table beneath the the stained silk tablecloth wobbled with each angry palmslap and magic fizzed and sang. Eliot thought he felt tremors in the timbers, rattles in the cupboards.

"You're trying too hard," he said.

"Fuck you."

"No, listen," Eliot insisted. He seized Julia's hands in his own, swifter and more limber, and held them with a firm and scientific grip. "You've got a natural flair for magic, but you don't trust yourself to make it work. You could burn yourself up entirely if you aren't careful. It's...it's not a pretty thing, when it happens."

He let Julia have her hands back and took up the deck of cards instead. He had never gone in for cards as such, of course, that was always Quentin's thing, but magic was magic and reconfiguring the physical universe was the trivial part. He began rearranging the deck, almost absently, to make it tell a better story.

"I don't think I even care anymore," she said with a little laugh. "I tried every way I could think of to get myself admitted to Brakebills. I even propositioned Quentin once, did he tell you that? When he turned me down I tried to go on teaching myself, but I never get anywhere with it, and it hurts." Her voice caught.

"So you don't care," he said, turning over the Fool, all insouciance and a deeply unattractive moon-and-stars print. "You might as well come with us, then, since you haven't got anything else planned." The Wheel of Fortune. "It'd be good for your magic, I expect Loosen you up a bit." The Ace of Wands. "You might even enjoy it, you know. It's Fillory, for fuck's sake."

Julia cracked a smile at that, sharp and sideways. "Fucking Fillory," she swore meditatively. "Quentin must be having one continuous orgasm over that."

Eliot grimaced. "Actually, Quentin's in denial. He's got himself holed up in a corner office at a big consulting firm, claiming he'll never go back to Fillory again, never do magic again. He had a bit of a rough time of it there. Of course, we're not going to let him stay there. Two kings and two queens of Fillory."

"You care about him."

"I do, strangely enough."

"I suppose I do, too. Strangely enough." Julia laughed, a little harshly, like a string quartet out of practice. "Fine, let's go be kings and queens of Fillory. Why the fuck not?"

"That's the spirit," Eliot said approvingly. "Don't bother packing anything."

"There's nothing here I want, anyway." Julia tidied up the pack of tarot cards absently before abandoning them, the card table, the hand-lettered sign advertising her services, the squalor of the squatted space, without a second glance.

The air was crisp and cold, like a mind-clearing headshake. Eliot was appropriately dressed for the weather, whereas if Julia had a coat somewhere she hadn't bothered to retrieve it, but she wasn't shivering in black silk. Eliot supposed she had contrived some kind of spell for retaining warmth, spending so much time in that semi-heated dump. That line of thought took him back to Brakebills South and Professor Mayakovsky, and he wriggled his aching shoulders beneath his coat.

"Have you ever flown?" Eliot demanded abruptly. "Flown magically, that is. It's the only way to fly."

"Of course not," Julia said, the old resentment creeping back into her voice.

"You should." Eliot burst the seams of his coat when he unfurled his wide white wingspan, but he had a whole wardrobe full of them and besides, they were going to Fillory. He launched himself into the air with a jaunty spring in his step and then floated Julia effortlessly up after him and they flew away.

**Author's Note:**

> A quick Tarot readings reference to this story excerpted from Rachel Pollack, whose work was extremely useful to me while I was writing:
> 
>  **The Magician** – Power, knowledge, creativity. A sense of life as magical, when everything goes right.  
>  **The King of Swords** – A powerful personality and intellect, someone in a position of authority.  
>  **The Three of Pentacles (reversed)** – Mediocrity, failure to do the best possible, difficulty working with others.  
>  **The Five of Cups** – Loss, sorrow, deep emotion.  
>  **The Nine of Swords** – Enduring a cruel or painful situation. Refusing to give in or look away.  
>  **The Fool** – Wildness, taking risks. Some kind of leap of faith. Resisting authority, following your own path.  
>  **The Wheel of Fortune** – Change of circumstances. Events taking place of their own accord, without conscious control.  
>  **The Ace of Wands** – Beginnings, new activity, creative impulse. A time of action, of great energy.


End file.
